Conservation and better access supported by IFAD

Rome, 19 March 2010 – Jordan, the only Middle Eastern country to ration water all year round, is setting an example in the region on the quality of water access and conservation.
With support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Agricultural Resources Management project in Jordan is working with rural communities to conserve their precious resources while improving farmers’ access to water sources.
“Often when we think of water quality, we think of safe drinking water, but at IFAD we also look at quality of water for growing food,” said Nadim Khouri, Director of the Near East and North Africa region.  “Managing water quality is even more important in countries such as Jordan, where water is an extremely scarce resource.”

According to Khouri, the lessons learned in Jordan can contribute to addressing climate change issues in other water-stressed countries. “It will be essential to ensure that local communities play a major role in any strategy for addressing the impact of climate change on water,” Khouri continued. “As IFAD's experience shows, it is important to link global and local interventions.”

The theme of this year’s World Water Day, ‘Clean Water for a Healthy World,’ aims to raise the profile of water quality issues and how those are linked to water quantity.

“We already know that if we want to reduce hunger and poverty, we have to improve access to clean and reliable water for poor rural people,” said Rudolph Cleveringa, Senior Technical Adviser for Rural Development and Manager of IFAD’s Learning and Knowledge on Innovations in Water and Rural Poverty project. “This entails making better use of available water resources, but also changing our approach so that poor rural people stop losing in the struggle for declining water resources.”

Jordan is classified as a chronically water-scarce country where less than 5 per cent of the land is arable, or fit for agricultural purposes. For smallholder farmers little or no rainfall means severely reduced cultivation and production, which leads to increased hunger and poverty. The lack of rainfall coupled with high evaporation of what little rain the country does get, has led to deterioration of the groundwater quality and an increase in the salinity levels. This leaves the soil deprived of its moisture making it difficult to grow certain crops.

In addition, smallholders also face the challenge of competition for water sources as the agricultural sector is under mounting pressure to divert increasingly larger quantities of the clean water resources to cities and urban centres for domestic consumption.

The IFAD-supported project in Jordan is helping to establish water-user associations and to introduce improved management practices in environmental conservation. The project encourages farmers to collect rainwater by building cisterns and small dams, as well as stonewalls to reduce soil erosion from flash flooding. It focuses on the engagement and participation of local communities in soil and water conservation activities.

“Community participation, and indeed, their complete engagement in conservation activities, empowers and motivates them to improve the management of common property resources – such as water - on which they depend,” Cleveringa said.

In Jordan, the motivation from community participation has sustained rehabilitation works on water springs, canals and off-farm reservoirs. The project, which is in its second phase, will directly benefit 22,300 rural households. IFAD has also helped Jordan’s smallholders reduce their use of water resources by replacing crops that have a high consumption of water, such as banana trees, with other varieties that use less. In addition, the project also supports research related to the treatment of household domestic wastewater and its possible use in irrigation of tree crops, such as olive trees

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Note for editors

According to The World Water Development Report 2009, the link between water and poverty is clear: the number of people living on less than US$1.25 a day coincides approximately with the number of those without access to safe drinking water.

Press release No.: IFAD/22/2010

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The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) works with poor rural people to enable them to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives. Since 1978, IFAD has invested over US$11 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering some 350 million people to break out of poverty. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized UN agency based in Rome – the UN’s food and agricultural hub. It is a unique partnership of 165 members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).